Matt Hamer

Hello. I'm Matt Hamer. I've been producing software for eighteen years. For the past ten,
I've created publishing systems, databases, crawlers and search indexes for popular sites like
Gizmodo, Lifehacker,
io9 and Blogger.
In 1999, I developed Weavelet, one of the first. web-based
feed-readers. A few years later, I helped build another aggregator, Kinja. Both of these systems
produced what Dave Winer calls a river of news.
The river-of-news model makes it difficult to keep up when too many sources are tracked, or some of
them publish at high-frequency. To attempt to solve this problem,
I started Attribyte in 2008 with the goal of developing a system that algorithmically
creates a personalized digest and search index by extracting
the most important or interesting entries from the global stream.

Projects

Gawker Media

100 Million Monthly Readers

I have been part of Gawker Media's tech team for as long it has
existed and helped it grow from a couple of people to over twenty.
For the past seven years, I've been deeply involved in the architecture and production of
Gawker's custom publishing, search, stats and discussion systems.

Kinja

Weblog of Weblogs

Long before Gawker Media had a conversation system using the name,
Kinja existed as a web-based blog reader.
My first assignment was the impossible-sounding task of building a parser to extract blog posts directly
from HTML. Later, I redesigned Kinja's parsing and crawling framework.
Finally, I became the project manager until the site was shut down and merged with Gawker Media.

Innovision

Protocols Everwhere

At Innovision Corporation, I served as Director of Research
for a short time and was a developer and project manager for the production of
one of the first widely deployed commercial OFX servers and many of
Innovision's
XML-related software tools and server products.
As a side-project, I developed one of the first RSS aggregators, weavelet.com,
demonstrated at the 1999 JavaOne conference. There was even a mobile version that ran on the
Palm VII.